Neil Cross - The Calling

‘Youwannaseeyourroom?’ he says, delighting in it. ‘Do you do you do you? Yes you do! Yes you do want to see your room! You do!’

He carries her through the front door into the wood-panelled hallway. It’s old fashioned, of course; Elaine was in her eighties when Henry suffocated her. She hadn’t remodelled for at least a generation. But Henry quite likes it. He thinks of it as timeless.

The baby is in his arms, still bite-sucking his thumb. ‘Are you hungry?’ he says. ‘Are you hungry, baby girl? Yes you is! You is a hungry liddle girl.’

He takes her up to her room, the nicest room in the house. Inside is a brand new cot from John Lewis, a brand new changing table and mat from Mothercare. Her new clothes, many still displaying price tags, hang from a chrome rail. (There is a second rail, which contains boy’s clothes, but Henry pretends not to see it. When Emma’s asleep, he’ll take the boy’s clothes away and quietly burn them. There’s a wood-burning furnace in the basement. It comes in handy.)

On the wall are prints of Pooh Bear and Piglet. Henry has waxed and polished the oak floor and laid down pretty rugs. The only item that isn’t new is a manky, one-eyed teddy bear, bald in patches. She’s called Mummy Bear. She’s Henry’s.

He lays the baby on her back. Her loose purple skin is streaked with blood and other ochres. But Henry’s read that babies don’t like to be clean: the smell of sweat and shit and sebum comforts them. So he tucks Emma tight under the blanket and gazes down upon her with tear-pricked eyes.

She opens and closes her mouth like an animatronic alien. And she has a curiously extra-terrestrial look of absolute wisdom in those ebony eyes. She has a perfect nub of a nose with finely etched little nostrils so pink they seem faintly illuminated. There’s the trembling, downturned rage and sorrow in her mouth, the balled fists on spindly arms. And her bowed legs! It’s funny, that her mother should have such good legs, while the baby’s should be like a wishbone! He expects they’ll straighten.

The baby begins to mewl as Henry steps back from the cot. Her cry is low and warbling, wet in the throat and not as loud as he’d feared it might be. But it’s piercing, a depleted sound that seems to cut through walls like a wire through cheese.

‘Don’t worry, iddle baby,’ he says. ‘Don’t oo worry.’

He leaves the room. His heart is thin and anxious in his chest. He hurries down to the kitchen. It has recently been scrubbed down so thoroughly the stink of bleach stings his eyes and he’s forced to open a window.

He reaches into the fridge. Inside are lined up twelve or thirteen sterilized bottles containing formula milk.

Henry takes a bottle and warms it slightly in the microwave. He tests its temperature against his forearm, then hurries upstairs through the faltering but gathering squall of his new daughter’s crying.

Luther goes to find Benny, who’s set himself up at Ian Reed’s desk.

Reed’s spare suit jacket, tie and shirt hang from the back of the door, still in dry-cleaner’s cellophane. In Reed’s desk drawer is a wash and shave kit: soap, disposable razors, deodorant, moisturizer for sensitive skin.

Benny’s already surrounded by empty cans of energy drink, takeaway coffees, bottles of multivitamins, half-eaten protein bars.

Luther says, ‘How’s it going?’

‘Slowly,’ Benny says. ‘I’ve been checking the Lamberts’ phone accounts, work email accounts. No extra-curricular flirting that I can see. Nothing of real interest.’

Luther pulls up a chair. ‘No old loves popped up on Facebook?’

‘We’re checking out all the friends,’ Benny says. ‘Right now.’

‘Yeah, but that’s what…’

‘Nearly three hundred people.’

‘Nearly three hundred people. We need to find this baby today.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘If we’re looking at a sex crime, normally we’d look for precursor offences in the area, right? An uplift in peeping Toms, knicker-sniffers, underwear thieves, flashers. But there’s been no uplift.’

‘Okay…’

‘So somebody this sexually confused,’ Luther says, ‘somebody who did what this man did to the Lamberts, you’d expect him to be known to us already, most likely a local schizophrenic. But that doesn’t feel right, does it?’ He fiddles with the beige keyboard of his computer. Types QWERTY. ‘People put so much of their lives out there. On Facebook and wherever. There’s so much information on who we are, how we’re feeling, what we’re doing. I don’t know. I just want to be sure.’

Benny nods, turns to his screen.

Two seconds later, Howie knocks and enters, a folder in her hand.

‘Womb raiders,’ she says, closing the door. ‘Women who snatch other women’s children from the womb.’

‘Yeah, but this was a man.’

‘Just bear with me, Boss.’

Luther makes a gesture: Sorry.

‘Usually, womb raiders are female. Average out at thirty years old. Generally no criminal record. Emotionally immature, compulsive, low self-esteem. Looking to replace a lost infant or one she couldn’t conceive.’

‘Right,’ says Luther. ‘But they also go for low-hanging fruit. Vulnerable and marginalized women. Not middle-class event organizers.’

‘Totally. But I’ve been going through Mr Lambert’s work diary. Every Thursday night, 7.30 p.m., they had an appointment at, quote, ISG.’

‘What’s ISG?’

‘Well, we know Mrs Lambert was taking fertility treatment for a long time. Mr Lambert’s a counsellor, so we also know they’re into therapy and whatnot. So I’m thinking — ISG: Infertility Support Group? So I go back to the first instance, call the number he listed-’

‘And?’

‘And I get through to the Clocktower Infertility and IVF Support Group. I’ve googled it. It’s less than a mile from the Lamberts’ home.’

‘So we’re saying what?’

‘You look at the catchment area, it’s well above national-average income. That’s probably true of the support group, too. But an infertile woman can undergo a psychotic episode if she’s middle-class or not.’

‘I still don’t think it was a woman.’

‘Totally,’ says Howie. ‘But it’s a group for couples. Plenty of men.’

Luther reads her smile and knows there’s more.

She passes him a photocopied printout, taken from Tom Lambert’s diary.

He scans it. ‘What am I looking for?’

She takes the printout from his hand, points to a blocked-off appointment. ‘They last attended the group three months ago.’

Luther grins, seeing it.

‘She kept attending the support group,’ Howie says. ‘Even when she was visibly pregnant. Imagine it. All these desperate couples-’

‘And here are Tom and Sarah Lambert,’ Luther says. ‘Gorgeous. Well off. In love. Blooming with it. Good work. Get your coat.’

Beaming, Howie leaves the office.

Luther grabs his overcoat. Pauses halfway through putting it on.

Benny looks at him.

‘Lust for power,’ Luther says. ‘Lust for money. Jealousy. All the things we do to each other. It all comes down to sex in the end. But sex comes down to babies. You look at a baby, it’s the purest thing in the world. The best thing. Totally innocent. So how do you square that? All this wickedness, in the name of creating innocence. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

Benny looks at him for a long time. Then he says, ‘If you don’t mind, I’m going to make myself forget what you just said.’

‘Good,’ says Luther. ‘Good.’

Buttoning his coat, he walks out to meet Howie.

The Clocktower Infertility and IVF Support Group is run from a small private hospital in North London.

The group is led by a GP called Sandy Pope. It seems to Luther she’s a little forbidding and severe to be running a group like this. But what does he know?